Digital Management Tips for the End of the School Year
Every spring a sure sign that the end of the school year is near appears in my inbox. That sign is an increasing number of questions from readers about how to preserve files when leaving one school for another and questions about archiving Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams.
Without further adieu, here are my tips for end-of-year digital management.
Archive Your Courses
In many cases, your school’s IT department will handle archiving your Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, or Canvas courses for you. If they don’t, you can do it yourself. Archiving, as opposed to deleting, doesn’t make the course materials inaccessible to you (unless you’re leaving your current job), it just makes the course inaccessible to students.
To archive a Google Classroom course, follow the directions in this video for archiving and restoring courses.
For Microsoft Teams users, Mr. Tompkins EdTech has a good tutorial on archiving Teams groups.
Canvas users can follow the directions in this tutorial by Rachel Mikel to archive their courses.
Saving and Moving Your Teaching Materials
If you’re moving from one school district to another over the summer, I’d highly recommend downloading any teaching materials you’ve made that you want to take with you. And if you’re staying in the same school I’d still recommend downloading copies of your most important digital materials because you never know what could happen over the summer.
Google Workspaces users can use Google Takeout to download any and all of the materials stored in their accounts. You can also download individual files and folders from your Google Drive account. Here’s my new tutorial on using Takeout and here’s my tutorial on downloading individual Google Drive files.
Office 365 users can download files and folders stored in OneDrive. To do that simply open OneDrive then select the files or folders you want to download and OneDrive will create zip files for you. Here’s a quick video demo of the process.
Should you find yourself moving from a Google Workspace environment to a Microsoft environment, this tutorial will show you how to make that transition. And if you’re going from a Microsoft environment to a Google Workspace environment, this tutorial can help you make that switch.
We Were On a Break!
First, let me know if you just read that line in the voice of Ross from Friends. Second, before going on break, set a vacation responder so that students or parents who email you during break know that you’re on a break and will get back to them at a certain date in the future.
Gmail and Outlook make it easy to turn on vacation responders. Here’s how to do it in Gmail and here’s how to do it in Outlook.
Lesson Plans and eBooks!
50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook I created for busy tech coaches. In it you will find ideas you can use to host your own short professional development workshops.
Around the World With Google Earth is a fun activity that you can use to help your students learn how to use Google Earth while also testing their knowledge of geographic and historic trivia.